Yelena Posnik
To this day, I am awakened from my sleep by the cries of half-dead horses
Daddy sang to her enthusiastically about Trotsky, Lenin and the proletarians. He was one of those who proudly built the Soviet Union - a state that then dragged her around the camps for years for learning German from her mother when she was young.
Before the heat of the Bolshevik Revolution began to melt the upper classes of Russian society, German was spoken in the household of the distinguished St. Petersburg senator Shulgin. Thus, the servants in his residence always learned the foreign language. Among them was Nina Vasilievna Skokova. A peasant girl from poor background, liked by the family liked to such an extent that they wanted to take care of her future.
However, it was mainly the Lenin-induced madness that eventually shaped her, turning her from a governess into a bakery worker and also contributing to her meeting Pavel Vasilyevich Kuzmin. An adventurer who came from a well-established bourgeois family, he nevertheless fell for the revolutionary fever and later took an active part in the bloody civil war on the side of the Reds.
When it was over, he was supposed to undergo officer training as one of its victors, but discipline and drill proved not to be what he was attracted to or capable of. So he left the military ranks and joined the enthusiasts who went to build a hydroelectric power station on the Volkhov River.
"It was thanks to these two people that I came into the world on September 16, 1924. They were my parents, but they never married. My dad simply didn't want to get married, and my mom didn't want a wedding ceremony either," says Yelena Pavlovna Posnik, the eldest of their three daughters. And she adds memories of the atmosphere she grew up in. "When Daddy cradled us, he used to sing about how 'Lenin, Trotsky and Lunacharsky met together with the proletarian people'.
